Well, somebody has to give this book a decent review. It was a decent book. Not great but good enough to keep reading if only to wallow in the luscious prose of Jonathan Franzen. This is the third book I've read by him. I can't really say that I loved any of them but his writing is so good that I can overlook some of the plot lines that don't grab me. This one had to do with corruption that came to St. Louis in the 1980s along with the female police chief from India. It sounds bizarre and becomes even more so when her minions start doing her dirty work behind the scenes. Her major foe is Martin Probst who built the Gateway Arch and is supposedly too level-headed to be taken in by Police Chief Jammu's "charms" so his family is targeted.

There are way too many characters to keep straight in the book but many are bit players who come and go. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on with the buying and selling of real estate, but it all comes down to political graft which, in my opinion, is not the most scintillating topic for a novel. I will recommend the book to fans of Franzen who are interested in reading his debut novel or my friends who hail from the St. Louis area. Franzen is a local boy who knows his turf and describes the beauty and decay in great detail. ( )

I give up. I've been working on this book for over a month now and I'm only halfway through, so it's time I threw in the towel. There are too many characters and too much conspiracy; I can't keep track. I think my head was in a bad place when I picked this up, and I shouldn't hold that against the book. But really. After 250 pages I should have at least found one character I care about, right? I'll leave a bookmark in it and maybe come back to it someday, but really, I doubt I will.

Bombay police commissioner S. Jammu, a member of a revolutionary cell of hazy but violent persuasion, contrives to become police chief of St. Louis. In a matter of months, she is the most powerful political force in the metropolis. Her ostensible agenda is the revival of St. Louis (once the nation's fourth-ranked city and now its 27th) through the reunification of its depressed inner city and affluent suburban country. But this is merely a front for a scheme to make a killing in real estate on behalf of her millionaire mother, a Bombay slumlord. Jammu identifies 12 influential men whose compliance is vital to achieving her ends and concentrates all the means at her disposal toward securing their cooperation. Eventually, the force of Jammu's will focuses on Martin Probst, one of St. Louis's most prominent citizens, and their fates become intertwined. Franzen is an accomplished stylist whose flexible, muscular, often sardonic prose seems spot-on in its rendition of dialogue, internal monologue and observation of the everyday minutiae of American manners. His imagination is prodigious, his scope sweeping; but in the end, he loses control of his material. Introducing an initially confusing superabundance of characters, he then allows some of them to fade out completely and others to become flat. The result is that the reader is not wholly satisfied. Any potential for greater resonance is left undeveloped, and this densely written work ends up as merely a bravura exercise. The longest book I have read without a point. The plot is potentially massive and the cast equally so but in the end it seems to be an exercise in self-gratification on Franzen’s part as other than personal relationships of Probst, the book goes nowhere and does nothing. ( )

Wikipedia in English (1)

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

St. Louis is embroiled in a political conspiracy after Jammu, a young woman from India, is installed as its new police chief. To succeed she realizes that respected businessman Martin Probst must be seduced or destroyed.